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The "Bad Mood" Lifestyle
11 Ways to Turn Yours Around and Create a Powerful New Reality
You're having another bad day. Your Internet is down. You discover a past-due credit card bill. The salesclerk 
rings up your order wrong. A traffic jam makes you late to pick up your child at daycare. Oh, nothing catastrophic occurs, just a series of frustrating delays, minor mishaps and dropped details that, cumulatively, make you crazy. All at once you realize: I'm in a terrible mood, again. In fact, it's hard to remember the last time I was in a really good mood. What am I doing wrong ... and what can I do to change it?
You're not alone. Brenda Anderson, author of Playing the Quantum Field: How Changing Your Choices Can Change Your Life (New World Library, 2006), says more people than ever before are bogged down in the monotony of chronic bad moods. And it tends to be the little things – rather than, say, a serious injury or the death of a friend – that set the spiral into motion. Because we have such frantic schedules, there's more opportunity for things to go wrong – and our agitation makes every issue seem more profound.
"Bad moods become bad days, which become bad weeks, which become bad months and years," Anderson says. "Before you know it, you're living an unhappy life and you probably think this is 'normal.' No wonder anti-depressant use is at an all-time high. It's a shame, because life can and should be wonderful. You can transcend the circumstances that are pulling you down ... you need only to learn how."
But aren't these maddening details – cancelled flights, missed appointments, bad haircuts – just reality? No, 
Anderson says. Your reality depends entirely on your choices: what you choose to observe and how you choose to see it. (Most of us view a cancelled flight as "bad," and that attitude triggers a bad mood, but we could just as easily see it as a chance to meet interesting people in the airport bar or spend a few fun hours shopping.)
